The Way I Feel

I’m trying to find the sweet spot between a transhistorical, universalising claim along the lines of Thucydides’ “most people do not take the trouble to enquire critically but believe any old crap” and a short-term ahistorical catastrophising claim about social media having rotted everyone’s brains. There was undoubtedly a lot of stupidity around in, say, the 1980s, but I don’t remember the times being so pervasively stupid as they are today (the feeling of doom, however, is extremely familiar). While I certainly think there is a plausible case that GenAI will seriously undermine cognitive skills if it’s allowed to take over schools and universities, that’s not the cause; rather, the widespread acceptance of GenAI outputs as authoritative even by people who are supposed to be learning critical skills suggests a culture where truthiness prevails over truth, where claims are judged plausible not because of evidence or logic but because of vibes.* Given that GenAI is simply producing a bland averaging of existing statements from its training data, you could say that it seems persuasive because it’s reflecting an already-existing preference for unsupported assertions that happen to suit our priors.

This morning’s case in point: someone responded to the Thucydiocy Bot’s dogged correction of the indestructible misattributed ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote (which has, incidentally, started to turn up on Bluesky; I guess it’s a proper grown-up social network now…) by citing Grok’s response to the question of whether Thucydides wrote it. Am I calling Grok a liar? Well, no – because that is to anthropomorphise a glorified autotext gadget. But also because the answer was surprisingly equivocal…

It feels a little surprising that anyone would cite this response as if it is a knock-down argument for attributing the quote to Thucydides; after all, it admits that the line is not found anywhere in his text. Clearly it’s sufficient that the Grok output maintains that there is some sort of connection, and, while acknowledging the existence of debate on the issue, effectively nullifies that by not providing any details or mentioning William F. Butler as the alternative (i.e. correct) author suggestion.

I do find this quite interesting – and so am grateful to this Ex-Twitter user for submitting the query, as I’ve decided on principle not to use GenAI tools if I can help it. A proper process of research by a human into this question of attribution would, I’d suggest, quickly identify that while the quote is frequently ascribed to Thucydides on the internet, this literally never involves offering a specific reference to the text or any other source for the idea; a longer search, wading through all of these useless examples, ought to locate (1) the Wikiquote page that provides links to supporting evidence in labelling the quote as ‘misattributed’ and (2) the sole peer-reviewed academic publication on the subject that establishes the same conclusion. Given that it’s an Ex-Twitter thing, one might also imagine that the persistent repetition of “It’s not Thucydides, it’s 19th-century soldier and author Sir William F. Butler” by the Thucydiocy Bot might have had an impact…

Best guess is that there is no, or at best insufficient, evaluation of source quality in whatever processes have generated this output; referenced academic analysis is not being heavily weighted against the sheer volume of people attributing the line to Thucydides, and the arguments against that attribution are incorporated as indications that there is a debate but not actually being evaluated as proof that the attribution is wrong. It’s difficult to avoid a sense that Grok could easily be used to generate BBC news reports – there is a debate, so we must offer a balanced, sitting on the fence summary of both sides, thereby legitimising the one that is unsupported ideology – if it isn’t already. Some people say it’s Thucydides, others say it isn’t.

If the output stopped there, it would be unhelpfully vague and incomplete but not actively misleading. Instead, it moves into the realm of vibes: Thucydides may not actually have written this, but doesn’t it feel like the sort of thing he would have said? Isn’t this a plausible version of what we find in his work? So even if someone else wrote this, we can still see it as a basically Thucydidean sentiment? This is heavily reminiscent of the sort of arguments regularly thrown at the Thucydiocy Bot by people who are, for whatever reason, heavily invested in the idea that Thucydides must be the originator of ‘Scholars and Warriors’ – the only thing missing here is a claim that perhaps it was in one of Thucydides’ other writings, now lost. My guess is that Grok is not programmed to have a Thucydides obsession, so this must simply be a reflection of the sorts of arguments found in its training data; evidence and logic being trumped again by vibes – my feelings don’t care about your facts.

A critical reader would take apart this output, distinguishing between statements of fact that could be verified (the line is often attributed to T; there is debate about its origin; it’s not a direct verbatim quote) and vibes-based speculation (it captures the spirit of his work; it’s more likely a modern paraphrase; it’s best understood as a Thucydidean sentiment). But then a critical reader wouldn’t be asking Grok in the first place – while the hedging and equivocating of the output apparently, in at least one instance, creates an impression of authority to legitimise the overall idea that the quote is Thucydidean, rather than (as the actual words say) establishing that there is at best considerable doubt on the matter.

*I did wonder about calling this piece ‘Looking Very Relaxed, Adolf Hitler on Vibes’, on the principle established by Alan Coren’s Golfing for Cats, in the interests of improving my visitor stats, but there are too many real Nazis around at the moment..